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Comment by cosmojg | Hacker News Reader

Assuming it's small enough for your needs, a used Intel NUC can get you loads more mileage than pretty much any ARM SoC at an equivalent price.

Currently available on eBay:

* $49.95 for an i5-5300U at 2.3GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage

* $89.00 for an i3-7100U at 2.4GHz, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage

* $135.00 for an i7-5557U at 3.1GHz, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage

...all loaded with ample driver support, extensive connectivity options, and bog-standard x86-64 instructions.

Obviously, there will always be use cases that call for a tiny ARM SoC and nothing else, but plenty of the applications for which people will buy an ARM SoC (e.g., Kodi/Jellyfin/Plex/Emby media centers, RetroArch gaming machines, Minecraft servers, streaming servers, web servers, network filtering, seedboxes, etc.) are better served by a used Intel NUC.

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Wait, NUCs are that cheap? I would appreciate a link so that I can get my hands on one. I don't use eBay often and filtering feels terrible on their site.

Not a NUC, or your parent poster, but I picked up a Dell Wyse 7020 thin client for ~$35 + shipping from a recycled electronics vendor in Pennsylvania. EPC here in the USA is an electronics liquidator / off-business-lease seller.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/275777770141?epid=519034385&hash=it...

A homegrown website on re-using thin clients: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/z/zx0q/

Of course, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to upgrade it and if it will replace my trusty RPi4, but I prefer fanless designs where possible, especially for 24/7 usage.

Search tips: look for "USFF" (ultra small form factor), or find a refurbishment vendor like EPC ( https://epcglobal.shop/collections/dell-desktops/price_-100-... ) and then track down their eBay page. Specifically, EPC Pennsylvania seemed to have some very inexpensive deals: https://www.ebay.com/str/epcpennsylvania

It can also help to search for specific business computer models on eBay, as small vendors doing electronics liquidation may just read the model number on the unit, take a picture, and fling it up on the store page in the "priced to sell" price bracket.

https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ has a list of small servers they have reviewed, so that can help with getting an idea of a computer's capabilities, upgrade paths, or gotchas (e.g. not supporting more than 8 GB of RAM or something).

Here are links to the exact machines I mentioned, in order:

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/364239987954

[2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/145134550658

[3] https://www.ebay.com/itm/175698509348

And here's a link to the search query I used to find those machines:

[4] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=intel+nuc

It's not too bad. I usually filter by US only, used but not for parts, then it has pretty decent search syntax like "Intel NUC (i5,i7) -parts" and you can keep adding "-unwanted_terms" to get the query down to something more selective.

Some of the low price NUC like things found on eBay are missing things like a 19vdc 4.5A external power supply, so expect that unless it's clearly called out in the auction.

If space is not an issue used Optiplexes or ThinkCentres are extremely useful for similar use cases

$30-150 AUD

The only concern I have is power consumption being orders of magnitude higher than modern SoCs

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